Pumpkin Seeds

When people ask me if I like to cook, my usual reply is, “I cook because my family needs to eat.”

That being said, if I put a recipe on this blog, you can rest assured:

• It was easy.
• It was cheap (in keeping with the theme of Budgets).
• It was devoured. Maybe not by all five of us — maybe even just by me. Because sometimes that’s good enough.

Roasting Pumpkin Seeds
For the first time -ever- I decided to try roasting those seeds we de-gut from the jack-o-lanterns rather than throwing them out with the rest of the trash. Surely it couldn’t be that hard…

You know what? It wasn’t!

Step 1: Rinse the seeds
My 6yo readily helped with this. Until she got grossed out by the stringy, slimy entrails.

“I’m still not old enough to do this, mom.”

Um, okay.

Step 2: Measure the seeds

I had almost four-cups worth.

Step 3: Boil with Salt

I threw the four cups of seeds into a pot with 12 cups of water. (3-1 ratio of water to seeds)
I then added about six tablespoons of salt (1-2 ratio of salt to water) and brought it all to a boil.
Once the little guy went away, that is. Hmmm… Doesn’t he know a watched pot never boils?

So I gave him the bottle of rum and sent him on his way.

Just kidding. Sheesh. How could I not notice I was taking a picture of my kid with a bottle of booze in the background? I need to work on my situational awareness.

A Word on Salt
Not all salts are created equal. I have no idea why, but I read that somewhere once. For what it’s worth, I used some sea salt we still have from our days in Italy. It’s cheap there. I have no idea if this is tastier for pumpkin seeds than just regular old table salt, but it’s what I did. Because I’m crazy like that.
If you try this concoction and your pumpkin seeds don’t turn out as yummy as mine did, maybe you need to go get yourself some good old sea salt. Just saying. Because I’m not about to turn around and make another batch using table salt to taste-test compare. That’ll have to wait until next year.

Step 4: Drain seeds and add oil and spices to taste

I dumped the drained seeds into a bowl and drizzled on a little olive oil…

Then I threw on some garlic powder and stirred it all up. There are lots of options for spicing these up:

• chili powder
• seasoned salt
• cinnamon and sugar…

And the list goes on. Go ahead and get crazy.

Step 5: Pour onto pan and bake at 400 degrees for ~40 minutes

I drizzled a little more olive oil onto the pan before spreading on the seeds.

Before baking…I also took them out of the oven and stirred them up a couple of different times during the baking process. At first I wondered if maybe I had overdone it on the olive oil. Boy, was I wrong.

The finished product…

Oh. My. Word.

Light, crispy, crunchy. Most decidedly addictive.

And a thumb’s up from my 6yo.

I will say that next time I would like to bake them longer, another 10 minutes or so. The darker brown ones are the tastiest.

The Cost
I’m going to make an executive decision and call it $0. After all, the cost of the pumpkins was already factored in to our total Halloween breakdown. I could try to compute the cost of the oil and spices… But I’m just not that into fractions.

Any comments? recommendations? Do share.

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Tagged as: eating